America’s Voice Research on Immigration Reform

The Obama Administration has recently announced that it will start allowing spouses and children of U.S. citizens, who are eligible for legal status, to apply for family unity waivers in the United States.

The U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez is the only one in Mexico that can process and issue certain types of immigrant visas--including those for spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens. But violence in Ciudad Juarez, and other towns, has exploded in the last decade, and has accelerated since 2008 as Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on Mexican drug cartels.

For years, anti-immigrant activists have scared Republican officials into thinking that GOP voters are rabidly anti-immigrant and oppose any candidate who supports common sense reform. The recent ascent of Newt Gingrich, who has weathered attacks from enforcement-only candidate Mitt Romney over his immigration position, demonstrates conclusively that this line of thinking is wrong.

Over the course of a single year, Russell Pearce fell from secure incumbency to resounding defeat. Jerry Lewis beat incumbent State Senator Russell Pearce soundly in the first-ever recall election of a state politician in Arizona history, getting 53.4% of the vote to Pearce’s 45.4%. Pearce had handily won his last 2 elections: defeating one challenger in 2008 and two in 2010, and winning 56% of the vote each time. As late as May 2011, Pearce bragged: “My constituency knows me, my district knows me — that’s why I have a 16-0 record with wins in my district.”

This report uses examples from across the country to document the "chilling effect" that police-DHS collaboration has on immigrant crime victims and witnesses, and describes how programs like Secure Communities (S-Comm) actually make all of us less safe.

This report explains why the forced E-Verify approach as advocated by Reps. Gallegly, Lungren, Bilbray, and their allies in Congress is a potential disaster for the nation's economy – in particular, California's precious agriculture industry. The same approach is also a precarious political move for California Republicans, who are increasingly shooting themselves in the foot with Latino voters.